Video: Patching an irregularly shaped area

I have gone ahead and saved my progress so far as Wall of clones.psd and we have cloned these walls. That's where the name comes from after all. But there is this rear wall right here that's covered in the big, actually cool looking graffiti. We are going to cover it up though; we are going to get rid of it. So the problem is this is an irregular little area here. That's super irregular but it's not going to be defined by a rectangle. If I try to heal over with a Rectangular Marquee, I'm going to get rid of 4, and I want to keep that little 4 sign, even though it's mostly illegible but the 4, you can see.

Photoshop mastery can be elusive, but in Photoshop CS4 One-on-One: Mastery, best-selling author and video trainer Deke McClelland teaches the most powerful, unconventional, and flexible features of the program. In this third and final installment of the popular and comprehensive series, Deke delves into the strongest features that Photoshop has to offer, including scalable vector graphics, Smart Objects, and Photomerge. Exercise files accompany the course.

Patching an irregularly shaped area

I have gone ahead and saved my progress so far as Wall of clones.psd andwe have cloned these walls. That's where the name comes from after all. But thereis this rear wall right here that's covered in the big, actually cool lookinggraffiti. We are going to cover it up though; we are going to get rid of it.So the problem is this is an irregular little area here. That's super irregularbut it's not going to be defined by a rectangle. If I try to heal over with aRectangular Marquee, I'm going to get rid of 4, and I want to keep that little4 sign, even though it's mostly illegible but the 4, you can see.

I am outside in larger world of Photoshop here, no longer inside the vanishingpoint filter. What you do is you define a selection in Photoshop. You just havePhotoshop do it, and that way you are masking off this area, and I haveactually saved a mask for you.If you go over to the Channels palette, you will see that there is this alphachannel called Rear Wall, just go ahead and Ctrl-click on it or Command-clickon it, on the Mac, and then go back to your Layers palette, make surePerspective edits is still active right there, and then we'll go up to theFilter menu and we'll choose Vanishing Point.

Now inside the Vanishing Point filter, you will go over here and you will getthe Rectangular Marquee tool or just the Marquee tool. And you willdouble-click inside of this plane back here in order to select the whole planelike so. All right, great.Now you will press and hold the Ctrl+ Shift keys or the Command+Shift keys onthe Mac and you will drag this guy over all the way to this wall right there.Now, I want you to note something that's highly confusing about this. I'll goahead and release, and then it will clone into the space.By the way, this specific exercise is sort of an exercise in confusion.

There is a lot of things that can go wrong. I just want to warn you this upfront.We'll do it together, we'll see the things that go wrong together, so that youcan personally witness me having problems which is always fun.I do want you to note that if you decide to Undo, if you press Ctrl+Z,Command+Z on the Mac, and then you try to do it again, do the Ctrl+Shift thing,this time you are moving a marquee around, like so. Then it's like what, well,I thought this is what you do.You have to press Ctrl+Z or Command+Z on the Mac twice. It's not going to lookany different. Nothing is going to happen. But well, I shouldn't say that.

What's going to happen is you will notice the Move mode changes to Destination right there.Let's go back here to where it was. The first time you press Ctrl+Z orCommand+Z, your marquee will go back to its proper location but Move mode willbe set to Destination dimmed. And then if you press Ctrl+Z or Command+Z again,then you will see Destination come back.What's happened is that when you do that Ctrl+Shift+Drag, you perform twooperations. You float the selection and you also do that sort of patch thing,that you float it. So your first Undo is undoing the patch and then your secondUndo is undoing the float.

I know that doesn't make any sense but that's what's happening. Anyway, I justwant you to know if you run into problems with Vanishing Point, it may bebecause you just need to press Ctrl+ Z or Command+Z again. Give it a try.All right, so anyway, Ctrl+Shift+Drag, Command+Shift+Drag this guy in order toheal that background, release the keys, zoom in. Here is where things getdelightfully confusing. And get your Transform tool because we have got to yankthis up, sort of like a garage door or something that we need to pull up. So that's covering everything but that 4. The 4 will take care of itself because it's masked.

But the Transform can go just wickedly delightfully wrong. Keep your cursorinside of this area to the best of your ability. If you stray, Oh! It's not doing it. Let's go out wider. Let's see if I can get it to do it. Oh! Sometimesif you move your cursor out here, you will see like this marquee just kind ofgo wonky and decide to go off into this area over here. It may be a function, let's see.You can actually fix things a little bit by turning these two options off andI'll show you those guys in more detail, later in just a moment actually.

But for now, let's go ahead and drag this guy up. This is the safest way to performthis Transformation, because if you start dragging it too far down, look at that. That's what I'm talking about. What's that about? That's because theselections now move to the bottom plane, and that's of course a disaster.So what you want to do is you want to move this down as low as you can. Oh!See, we are chasing the marquee, can get very confusing right there. Oops! Lookat that guy. Wow! What's that about? Okay, so let's go ahead and drag this guyup, Oh! That's too high.

But you would just want to make sure that you drag it up high enough that youare filling the entire back panel and then we'll just go ahead and drag thisguy down a little bit, so that it fills up this entire space. So we just wantthis plane-- I'm sorry, not panel. This plane to be filled up with this patched area right there.Then I'll go ahead and press the X key, so we can zoom in for just a moment,temporarily. The great thing is look, thanks to that selection that I made, weare keeping the 4 and we are also keeping that shadow in there. So it looksnice and realistic with one exception, darn it, I goofed. I made a mistake.

So we are going to have to back up a little bit here.I will press Ctrl+Z, Command+Z on the Mac a few times until we get back to thislocation right there. Let's see, if I move to the Marquee tool, Destination isdimmed, so Ctrl+Z or Command+Z again so that Destination is available. Heal needs to be set to On. That's the goof. Sorry, folks.Now, let's try it again, but this gives you a sense of how this works. Let's goahead and drag this over, Ctrl+Shift+ Drag or Command+Shift+Drag onto this walllike so. In order to fill things up, that's going to be a better match. Now,let's press the T key to switch to the Transform tool, and let's see if we canmove this up, all right, and I'm trying to be deliberate and careful so thatthings don't go kooky and wrong for me. And this looks like it might actually work out.

Again, let's see if I press the X key to zoom in, it looks pretty good. Might be a little too tall; let's see if I can drag that down with that somethinggoing horribly wrong. There we go, because we don't want those tiles to be too tall. That works for me, I'll buy it.Whatever this edge is going on there, wasn't really there in that originalwall, but it's going to be there in the new one, so good. Now, while the coastis clear, let's go ahead and click on the OK button in order to accept thismodification and it just fills in the selected area.I will click off of this selection in order to deselect it of course. Actually,I'll undo that de-selection there. I'll press Ctrl+Z or Command+Z on the Macbecause you know what, we ought to just go ahead and apply Gaussian Blur to that.

As we are applying Gaussian Blur here, it stands a reason that thisshould be a little blurry as well.So I'll go up to the Filter menu and just choose Gaussian Blur right up frontthere, or press Ctrl+F, Command+F on the Mac in order to apply a little bit ofblurring and now I can click off and the deed is done. So that's how you goabout healing inside of an irregular area.In the next exercise, we are going to introduce the Scrubbco banner. We are finally going to take advantage of this wonderfully colorful goofy thing hereand bring it into this what has to be called I think the grimmest scene in thisentire series. And we are going to have fun doing it, darn it. So join me, please.

Q: My Polygon tool is locked into a very small size. I can use the Transform tool to increase it's size once drawn, but I must have something set that will not allow me to freely draw it like I can the other shapes. What could be causing this problem?

A: This could be caused by a value associated with the Radius option of the tool. Click the down-pointing arrowhead to the right (a few tool icons over) from the Polygon tool in the options bar at the top of the screen. This brings up pop-up panel. If the Radius option has a number value, select that value and press Delete or Backspace to clear it out. That should fix the problem.

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